IMO you touch on the real heart of the issue at the end - the real world and business is messy and really _is_ just a pile of if statements.

When the problem itself is technical or can be generalised then abstractions can eliminate the need for 1000s of if-statement developers but if the domain itself is messy and poorly specified then the only ways abstractions (and tooling) can help is to bake in flexibility, because contradiction might be a feature not a bug...

In most assembly languages, the instructions are essentially load and store, arithmetic operations, and branch and jump. Almost everything is abstractions around how to handle branching and memory.